Alan Cox, one of the most respected figures in the UK open source community, has warned of complacency over the security of open source projects. Speaking to delegates at London's LinuxWorld conference on Wednesday, he emphasised that considerable sums of money were being spent to try and hack into open source systems. And he cautioned that many open source projects were far from secure. "Things appear in the media like open source software is more secure, more reliable and there are less bugs. Those are very dangerous statements," Cox said. My take: Agree wholeheartedly. Security complacency, often seen in OSNews' comments sections, is very, very dangerous.

I agree with you and see your point on secure proprietary systems having the potential of being as secure as OSS. Maybe using the term "exponentially" wasn't quite right. But I saw it as OSS isn't looking to turn a buck, therefore the community surrounding it should be more open to produce the best product they can since it is really their names and reputations on the line when developing for the product. I also agree with another poster in one of the above posts that "secure" software is only one piece of the security spectrum.

I suppose I really see OSS as the ultimate push for development of ideas and innovation. Like Mozilla Firefox forced MS to release a better product in IE (regardless of which brand you wave the flag for). And like the emergence/dominance of foreign cars in America that forced the domestic companies to produce a better product. As long as you have OSS on equal footing with pay services, or software; the product should only get better. It's competiton that drives innovation, because innovation is usually expensive. Innovation is typically better for the consumer.

I do think OSS still has the ability of being more adept at incorporating new ideas and change, either for security sake or any other part of the overall system. And it's that speed and ability to change quickly that would make it much more of a viable alternative to any propretary system.